Cons: No publishing.
Local SMBs should explore other social media analytics and management options.

Bottom Line: When it comes to enterprise-scale social media analytics, Synthesio does it all.
The platform's scope of monitoring, social audience breakdown tools, and business value metrics are unmatched.
It's the Editors' Choice for enterprises.

Pros: Strong suite of social listening and influencer management capabilities.
Buzz Graph, Tweet Life, and look-alike list features are genuinely innovative.
Targeted social campaign data.
Comprehensive social campaign management and marketing with Expion.

Cons: Data visualizations take some time to load.
Pricing mounts quickly when adding users and additional tools.
No pricing transparency for enterprise packages.
SMBs are priced out.

Bottom Line: Sysomos is a social listening and influencer identification tool that can do it all, combined with Sysomos Expion for a full social media management and analytics package.
If you're an enterprise-scale business that can afford the hefty price tag, Sysomos makes it easy to not only gather targeted social data but to do something with it.

Pros: Excellent private backchannel.
Great for nonessential communication and discussion.
Wonderful, rich set of tools and options.

Cons: No calendar, task-management, or other collaboration features.
Requires thoughtful use to be effective.

Bottom Line: Slack is an excellent online communication tool with a rich collection of settings and options.
It's not a soup-to-nuts collaboration tool, but there's nothing better for messaging and back-channel chat.

Cons: Limiting for global enterprises with a large portfolio of brands.
Analytics and reporting can't match enterprise social listening platforms.
No Pinterest or YouTube support.
Currently cannot attach videos to posts.

Bottom Line: Zoho Social is an easy-to-use social media management and analytics platform with enough smart publishing and reporting features to satisfy social or brand managers looking for straightforward metrics and an easy UX.
If your business is already a Zoho CRM customer, it's a no-brainer.

Pros: Best management capabilities of the bunch.
Drag-and-drop publishing interface is unmatched in usability.
Good individual post and inward-facing growth analytics.

Cons: Still a young platform that's building out its analytics side.
Doesn't provide any data on audience, demographics, keywords, mentions, or competitor comparisons.
No Instagram support.

Bottom Line: Buffer for Business is an impressive social publishing platform that's great for managing presences and tracking basic post-based analytics and presence growth.
If you want in-depth brand sentiment analysis and social reach analytics, though, look elsewhere.

What Is Social Media Management?

Moving up from being just another marketing channel, social media has become a primary conduit for any kind of business to connect with customers and partners. Touchpoints can vary widely. It could be matching social perception trends to specific records or audience groupings in your customer relationship management (CRM) repository; or, you could record a customer's @mention in your helpdesk system when she complains about your product over Twitter. What makes social media so attractive and valuable is that it's a real-time conduit for measuring your audience's pulse and pushing out content that aligns with your brand. To be an effective social media manager or marketer across all these fronts requires a robust social media management and analytics platform.

It's not hard to see how small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and enterprise organizations could sink a lot of precious time and money into a social media program and come up empty-handed. Empty-handed, that is, except for all of the business-critical data they have and don't know how to analyze, and thus, monetize. Let's say you're in marketing. You're possibly tasked with being the entire department. You're a power user but not a social media expert. With all of the hype surrounding social media marketing, it's still important to take the time to educate yourself on the basics. Find out what data will be useful and then find a tool that delivers it. Don't try to tailor your company's social media program to a particular toolbox without a plan.

Social media management tools centralize your social efforts and publishing in a single console or dashboard. These platforms let you add rich multimedia to posts, tailor messages to different networks and audiences, and toggle social channels on and off. These platforms take much of the manual effort out of managing different social profiles on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and more. Combined with the analytics you're gathering on engagement, followers, posts, and a host of other metrics, these platforms help you get a handle on your social media efforts. They also help you feed all of the data you're gathering back into your online marketing, customer strategy, and other areas of your business. To one degree or another, social media touches just about everything.

It's worth noting here that even armed with all the sophisticated technology offered in this roundup, there is no substitute for organic and genuinely interesting content on your company's social media channels. You can have the most technically sound social media strategy, but it's still up to you to create something your audience will want to follow and engage with. The best of these tools automate a lot of the hard work that your customers will never see (after all, the best social media appears effortless). It's just important to temper your expectations on what these platforms actually do before investing in any of them. Ultimately, you'll have to consider your brand's personality and tone for yourself.

Analytics Is a Tool's Glue

A good place to begin discovering what kind of data you need is by checking out your competition online. The various social networks (with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter being the core four) will give you a good picture of what data your rivals are getting and how they're getting it. Now look at deltas in their data that you can see because you're in their industry. What's missing?

Competitive analysis will play a big role in your program so make sure the tools you choose can perform here. It's also important that your tool has good social listening ability, too. In other words, make sure it can pick up and deliver any mentions, conversations, hashtags, tweets, and other chatter about your company. Of the products covered in this review roundup, Crimson Hexagon, Synthesio, Sysomos, and Talkwalker stand out as frontrunners in enterprise-scale listening capabilities for global brands, including providing detailed sentiment analysis and data visualizations.

Of course, you need to know who is talking about you as well. These are the influencers who you will want to identify for customer engagement, the ones who will be key in propagating and spreading the good word about your business. We like Synthesio, Sysomos, and Talkwalker when it comes to flushing out influencers and their data—as long as your business is prepared to pay the enterprise premium for it. On the SMB end of the scale, Sprout Social and Zoho Social hold their own at a much more affordable price point, joining Buffer for Business and Hootsuite as great combined social publishing, management, listening, and analytics platforms, with more affordable pricing tiers.

Team tracking, collaboration, and oversight are also crucial elements in running a well-oiled social marketing team as a business grows. All of the tools reviewed support team activity such as response assignment and team member tracking, depending on the tier. But the marketing team features in Sysomos Expion, enhanced team collaboration in Sprout Social, and the well-integrated Discuss tab of Zoho Social stand out in particular, along with a nifty new Slack integration in Brand24. All of the products reviewed have geographic location, demographic, gender, and age stats as well, although the higher-end enterprise social analytics platforms (such as Synthesio and Sysomos) go beyond those basic demographics with deeper community analysis and return-on-investment (ROI) metrics.

A tool's analytics capability is the overarching factor that will determine its usefulness because it takes all of the types of information mentioned earlier, turns them into data, and then displays them visually in compelling formats. A tool can gather all sorts of data but how the analytics piece of the tool disseminates the intelligence—and delivers the insights—is key to whether or not it can be used to accomplish planned business objectives. These objectives can include driving marketing campaigns, forecasting possible brand crises, and revealing new markets.

Learn to Speak Boolean

If you don't already know some Boolean search basics, then life will become infinitely easier once you do. Boolean searches rely on specific modifiers such as parentheses, quotes, AND, NOT, and OR, along with Company, Keywords, Name, and Title, to find results related to the types of profiles for which you're looking. It's a good idea to embrace Boolean logic before investing in any particular toolset so you can test before you buy.

You'll be able to set up Queries and Rules within the social tool suite to see if it produces the data that you determined was needed at the outset. If one tool doesn't produce the data the way you need to see it, then try another. Here's a link to a LinkedIn Boolean search primer. Several of the platforms reviewed have strong pureplay analytics enhanced with a Boolean search option, including Brandwatch Analytics, Crimson Hexagon, Synthesio, and Talkwalker. It's necessary for anyone using them to have a reasonably strong command of Boolean scripting.

Stacking Them Up

We tested the core tasks critical to each platform's social media management and analytics features, with SMB and enterprise business value in mind. Such core tasks include how each tool gathers listening and mention data from the main social networks and other sources, and how creatively and effectively each tool transforms and presents the data with reporting and visualizations. We also tested how each tool configures and sends alerts, connects social data to tangible ROI, and does both competitive and community analysis on top of offering an intuitive home base for social publishing and content curation.

It's worth noting that many of the non-enterprise products use Facebook Analytics to some degree to gather their Facebook data. Facebook Analytics requires that a Facebook page have at least 30 likes before it begins to pay attention to it and gather stats. Google Analytics is also a valuable free tool and generates numerous types of reports and tools. Reports can be segmented and filtered to suit business needs. Real-time views reveal which new content is popular, how much traffic today's new promotion is driving to your website, and which tweets and blog posts draw the most engagement. Being able to pull from this application greatly benefits other social tool apps. Of the SMB-focused offerings, Sprout Social Premium, Buffer for Business, and Hootsuite Pro can integrate Google Analytics.

Sprout Social's user interface (UI), with its single-stream mention monitoring, was the easiest to set up and navigate, and also offers the widest variety of relevant social networks and produces numerous reports which can be downloaded in more than one format. You can build basic Queries and script Rules, and run competitive analysis. Of the products reviewed, Sprout Social, which begins at $99 per month, is the best value. It meets all of the qualifications for an entry-level social media tool suite, with the ability to scale, and is this roundup's Editors' Choice for SMBs.

Hootsuite and Zoho Social are close behind in offering a do-it-all social publishing and analytics hub for SMBs, and Buffer for Business is closing the gap with a packed feature release cadence to bolster its listening and influencer management chops. These are all tools that any social media manager or business user can operate with ease. They don't take a social data whiz and won't break your SMB's bank, but global brands with far more expansive listening requirements will want to consider enterprise offerings.

The Enterprise Tier

For businesses with a large cadre of social presences, multiple social marketing campaigns running simultaneously, and a growing global footprint, the less expensive tools may not cut it. If you're willing to pay for them, then tools such as Brandwatch Analytics, Crimson Hexagon, Talkwalker, Synthesio, Sysomos, and Brand24, arm enterprise organizations with a sleeker, more powerful class of social analytics tools.

For $700 to $2,000 per month and beyond, these enterprise-scale tools become social data hubs. They offer global monitoring and search querying capabilities on par with the best website performance services. They also offer an infrastructure and complex workflow capacity on the scale of project management software.

The most complete solutions in this tier are Synthesio and Sysomos, our Editors' Choices for enterprises. They both give the most extensive deep-dive analytics using the most engaging data visualizations and reporting. Each listening metric Synthesio measures, be it mentions, engagement, sentiment, or influencer reach, has drill-down capabilities to generate a custom dashboard with post lists and graphs from any point in the UI. Crimson Hexagon offers a similarly robust experience, with the capacity for live social stream monitoring and the best interactive visualizations for keyword and hashtag data. Sysomos offers deep social listening power plus an added publishing and social marketing campaign management product called Sysomos Expeon. It's a significant added expense on top of the main Sysomos platform, but the ad campaign-specific ROI data and reporting it provides is unmatched.

The other critical capabilities an enterprise gets at this level include greater contextual data customization tied directly to business goals. An enterprise also gets community and sentiment analysis that filters a wide social audience into defined market segments. These market segments offer clear opinions about a brand or product; the business can then tie that information to customer intent.

For the data nerds, Talkwalker gives you the most granular control over Boolean search query customization, along with Smart Themes that act as filters on results. These help business users extract only the data that represents a specific subset of a social campaign's target audience. Crimson Hexagon's Opinion Monitor takes that a step further with its custom sentiment analysis. It goes beyond the basic positive, negative, or neutral sentiment associated with a social post; it instead programs a range of custom responses related to a particular product and refines the post categorization with a machine learning (ML) algorithm.

Ultimately, it's about bringing social analytics full circle to prove ROI to your executive team. Synthesio shines here with a full-blown ROI tab of analytics tools to chart the progression of a social user to a follower and a follower to full-blown customer acquisition. This also plays into Synthesio's creative analytics tools for community analysis, using techniques including psychographics to break a customer base down into an ecosystem. It's into this ecosystem that enterprises can market social campaigns at audience segments based on their professional fields, personal interests, or brand preferences.

To convert and monetize a social audience, your business needs a tool that can turn all of this data into a concrete strategy, with easily understandable reporting and visualizations. The tool needs to do this while also monitoring the full scope of your social audience on all of the networks or platforms they live. Many of the enterprise analytics tools don't offer built-in publishing and some of the SMB-focused offerings don't have quite the depth of analytics. Because of this, be sure to pick a social media analytics tool that's affordable for your business and easy to use—and one that offers third-party integrations or an application programming interface (API) should you need to hook it into other software.

Social media management and analytics tools are the key to transforming your business model from one that "does social" to one in which the social component is an integral and profitable element of engaging with, monetizing, and gaining valuable data from your customers. Choose a tool that will give your business room to grow.

CRM Integration

If your business is at the point where you are considering a social media management platform, then you probably already have a CRM tool in place. CRM systems are an important part of your company's tech arsenal, helping you to effectively keep tabs on your interactions with customers. If used properly, they can be extremely effective in improving customer satisfaction and driving up sales.

A number of the top social media management tools will offer integration with popular CRM systems. Zoho Social, unsurprisingly, integrates with the company's CRM offering. In that particular scenario, Zoho Social will record every person who has engaged with your company on a connected social media channel. From there, you can add them to Zoho CRM as a lead from within the software.

Other platforms work in a similar fashion. Synthesio allows you to connect social data to a CRM services such as Salesforce, Sysomos, Hootsuite, and Brandwatch; they all have Salesforce functionalty as well. Occasionally, you'll find integration with other popular CRM platforms (Hootsuite, for example, offers integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM), but unsurprisingly, most social platforms seem to go with one of the CRM industry's biggest names.

Depending on how invested your company is in CRM, integration might be a make-or-break feature for you. Being able to convert social engagements into leads is a powerful feature that, if used correctly, can add a lot of benefit to your business. If you find CRM integration important, then be sure to research which social media management tools are compatible with your relationship management service of choice.

Bottom Line: Zoho Social is aimed at small to midsized business marketing professionals looking for solid analytics combined with good listening capabilities and integration with other back office sales ...

Bottom Line: Hootsuite is one of the first names people list when considering social media management, which is with good reason considering all its core features as well as the built-in listening, publi...

Bottom Line: While it can get a little expensive if you exceed your quotas, Brand24 does a good job of delivering the core social media management and listening features that small to midsized businesses...

Bottom Line: For enterprise-scale social media analytics, Synthesio is a great option. The platform offers excellent monitoring capabilities, business value metrics, and other marketing features that eas...

Bottom Line: Sysomos is a social media management platform that provides a one-stop-shop for enterprises looking to better understand and control their social presence. If you can afford it, Sysomos is o...

Bottom Line: While a bit on the expensive side, Brandwatch Analytics does a solid job of delivering the social media management features that small and midsized business customers expect along with audie...

Bottom Line: Talkwalker does well in its chosen small to midsized business segment, providing those customers with a good selection of analysis features as well as competitive benchmarking and pre-built ...

Bottom Line: Buffer for Business is aimed at smaller organizations that don't need the in-depth analytics demanded by enterprise marketers. Here the focus is on ease of use and good post features along w...

Rob was previously an editor at SD Times covering software, managing social media, and writing narrative-driven features on any offbeat story or trend he could find. He graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications ... See Full Bio